Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who their prime minister is.

Five of its creatures--the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish--are the most lethal of their type in the world. This section of the book starts off with historical accounts from the time when Australia was discovered and goes on to illustrate how the Australians built a dynamic and prosperous society from a modest and unpropitious beginning. In the investigations that followed, it emerged that Aum's substantial holdings included a 500,000-acre desert property in Western Australia very near the site of the mystery event. This book shows its roots - in a colour supplement commissioned by The Mail On Sunday, padded out with some A-level history and lots of twee observations of a country crossed at speed.

we meet many of the strange and unique animals, fish, and plants that have developed that haven't changed since even before the dinosaurs. Those who read Bill Bryson’s travel books must end up in two minds about whether or not they would like to be his travelling companion for one of his journeys: or indeed, one of the people he meets, chats with, or whose conversations he overhears and records. Now living in the UK, Bill Bryson made his name with his iconic, insightful and very, very funny books of travel writing including: The Lost Continent, Neither Here Nor There, Notes from a Small Island (voted the book that best represents Britain in a national poll) A Walk in the Woods and The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island. Bryson dishes out praise and derision in roughly equal measure, so that he comes across as neither overly effusive or curmudgeonly, but it often both, sometimes within the space of a sentence or two. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.

Wherever he goes he finds Australians who are cheerful, extroverted, and unfailingly obliging, and these beaming products of land with clean, safe cities, cold beer, and constant sunshine fill the pages of this wonderful book. From my experience, people rarely recognise themselves in books, and of course, the author can always change the names.

We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. However, when Bryson switches his attention to our Antipodean cousins, all of that angst immediately dissipates, and you can sit back and enjoy his particular talent for finding nuanced little stories in among the detritus of life and bringing them to life with his sparkling and witty prose. and Pamela Harriman, the former ambassador and socialite who died in February 1997, a misfortune that evidently required recording 22 times in the Times.

For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.It is an accomplishment so singular and extraordinary, so uncomfortable with scrutiny, that most histories breeze over it in a paragraph or two, then move on to the second, more explicable invasion--the one that begins with the arrival of Captain James Cook and his doughty little ship HMS Endeavour in Botany Bay in 1770. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins Down Under--not entirely without reason, of course. In the same period, for purposes of comparison, the Times ran 120 articles on Peru, 150 or so on Albania and a similar number on Cambodia, more than 300 on each of the Koreas, and well over 500 on Israel.